Over a year ago we watched the movie, V for Vendetta. Like many others, I thought it was a really good analogy of our present global situation even if it was presented as being "in the future." It not only conveys the idea of how the media is spun in a number of brilliant scenes, but it actually discussed the fact that words were being changed, that our language was being co-opted to the use of the psychopaths.

Let's take a look at a few clips specially edited to make the point and then I'll continue:

Right before September 11, 2001, the alarm bells were ringing across trading floors about some unusual trading in the US stock options market. An extraordinary number of trades were bet that American Airlines stock prices would fall.

The trades are called "PUTS" and at least 450,000 shares of American Airlines stock were involved. What raised the alarms was that more than 80 percent of the orders were "puts" and they far outnumbered "call" options (those betting the stock would rise). Usually, the numbers are fairly balanced on these kinds of trades so this imbalance caught traders' attention.

The next day, four American passenger jets were hijacked in a terrorist attack on American soil. Three of these jets belonged to American Airlines. Two allegedly crashed into the World Trade Center and one allegedly crashed into the Pentagon. The fourth aircraft was a United Airlines passenger jet that allegedly crashed into a field near the town of Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

Oil and gold continued their shocking rise last week. Oil has gone up 30% against the dollar since September 1 and gold has gone up 19%. During that same period the dollar has fallen 6.5% against the euro, so gold and oil are going up against both currencies. Oil is going up in absolute terms, measured against gold. Things seem to be reaching a crisis point.

In my previous post, I included a chapter from Farewell America which gave a broad overview of the "American Psyche." It is crucial to understand the forces at play here in order to understand why John Kennedy was murdered, and why, when he died, the death knell of the American Republic - as well as its people - began sounding.

As I have written before, most Americans are woefully ignorant of their true history, and by design.

Over the past few days I've been thinking a lot about John Kennedy and what our world might have been like if he had lived. These thoughts didn't just come out of the blue, they are the result of the fact that I have just finished reading one of the saddest books ever written: Farewell America by the pseudonymous author, James Hepburn.

Fear is very much known to everyone and it is highly contagious. We see it everywhere, especially in today's world. When one becomes fearful, one's mind resorts to a state of being clouded or paralyzed. In order to overcome this kind of fear, one would require knowledge and the ability to think for oneself. Knowledge can surely protect us from that which we would be fearful of.

I've had a lot of fun recently with my tiny (and unofficial) slice of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But, though I was one of thousands of IPCC participants, I don't think I will add "0.0001 Nobel Laureate" to my resume.

The timing of the release of the new documentary "Jimmy Carter: Man From Plains" was not intentional. The movie is arriving in theaters just before the Bush administration's proposed Middle East conference in Annapolis, scheduled for the end of this month. But the former president's clarity on the Palestinian question contrasts sharply with George W. Bush's refusal to face reality, casting a pall over hopes to conclude his presidency with a diplomatic triumph.

In the film, Carter repeatedly and unequivocally states what Palestinian and Israeli peace advocates view as undeniable: to achieve Israeli-Palestinian peace, with all its benefits for the world, Israel must end its illegal and oppressive occupation of the West Bank. That is a prerequisite that neither President Bush nor congressional leaders of both parties can approach for fear of being labeled anti-Israeli or even anti-Semitic (as Carter has been).

The latest October Reuters/Zogby Index shows record low approval ratings for George Bush and Congress - 24% for the president that looks almost giddy compared to the bottom-scraping 11% level for the nation's lawmakers. It's more evidence that the criminal class in Washington is bipartisan and hoping November, 2008 will change things is pure fantasy.

A voter groundswell sent a message last November to end the Iraq war and occupation. Instead, the Democrat-led 110th Congress continues to fund it generously. In May, the House overwhelmingly passed HR 1585, the FY 2008 National Defense Authorization Act. It calls for $506.8 billion for DOD plus $141.8 billion (of the $150.5 billion White House request) for ongoing Iraq and Afghanistan operations. The Senate followed with a similar bill on October 1 with only three opposing votes against it. Neither bill proposed an Iraq withdrawal timeline, and final legislation has yet to be sent to the president.

Since the return of democracy in Spain, Spain's political leaders and political society have demonstrated an extraordinary determination to start anew, after the crisis-afflicted 75 years that began with what the Spaniards have called "the catastrophe" - the collapse of the Spanish empire under blows from an exuberant and adolescent United States that believed it was coming of age as a world power. It's evidence that empires end, but nations don't, and resurrection is possible.

America's transcontinental expansion following the Civil War and the garish joys of the Gilded Age gave Americans a taste for foreign adventure, whetted by the proximity and vulnerability of Cuba. And if Cuba, why not Puerto Rico, and the Philippines? Admiral Alfred Mahan, America's prophet of naval power and of the economic necessity of colonialism, offered convincing economic reasons for American colonial expansion, and the failing Spanish empire was at hand.

SOUTHERN DEMILITARIZED ZONE, Iraq -- On the "Highway of Death," 11 miles north of the Kuwait border, a collection of tanks, armored personnel carriers and other military vehicles are rusting in the desert.

Six-year-old Fatma Rakwan, being held by her mother at the Basra Hospital for Maternity and Children, was recently diagnosed with leukemia.

In 1991, the United States and its Persian Gulf War allies blasted the vehicles with armor-piercing shells made of depleted uranium -- the first time such weapons had been used in warfare -- as the Iraqis retreated from Kuwait. The devastating results gave the highway its name.

Today, nearly 12 years after the use of the super-tough weapons was credited with bringing the war to a swift conclusion, the battlefield remains a radioactive toxic wasteland -- and depleted uranium munitions remain a mystery.

Elijah Cummings was angry. The Democratic congressman from Baltimore represents a district that is home to the Afro-American Newspaper, a weekly publication that is in jeopardy of going out of business due to the United States Postal Service's recent rate hike on small periodicals. Cummings' testiness showed when a House subcommittee heard testimony on the rate increase from a host of postal officials earlier this week.

The Audit Bureau of Circulations released circulation numbers for more than 700 daily newspapers this morning for the six-month period ending September 2007. Of the top 25 papers in daily circulation (see chart, separate story), only four showed gains.

SENIOR officers, including three colonels and a lieutenant-colonel, are among 70 personnel to be punished for slipshod practices that allowed a B52 bomber to fly across America carrying six nuclear-armed cruise missiles that should never have been loaded under its wings.

The incident triggered a rare "Bent Spear" alert - code for an incident involving live nuclear weapons - which raced to the secretary of defence and the White House, leaving red-faced air force commanders with a lot of explaining to do.

On Monday "V" visited security check points at the White House, the main Treasury, IRS and Justice Department Buildings and the Capitol. "V's" purpose was to deliver the People's Petitions for Redress of Grievances relating to the Government's violations of the war powers, tax, privacy and money clauses of the Constitution, and to inform key Government officials that at least 100 more "Vs" would be at their doorstep on November 14th expecting a response to the Petitions.

About 60 protesters dressed up as the Guy Fawkes look-a-like "V," from the movie "V for Vendetta," staged a protest at the White House yesterday. In an encouraging sign, a group of elementary school children visiting the White House on a school trip were much more interested in "V" than in the White House or its occupant.

George W. Bush may indeed be the worst president ever, and Dick Cheney the worst vice-president imaginable but that does not exonerate the American people because Americans have the constitutional right and responsibility to remove miscreants from office.

The Staunton grand jury indicted a Manassas man and his company Thursday on 16 felony obscenity charges concerning adult videos that were sold in October at After Hours Video, according to Staunton Prosecutor Raymond C. Robertson.

Two key Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee announced Friday afternoon that they will support the Bush administration's nominee for attorney general, former federal judge Michael Mukasey, virtually assuring his confirmation as head of the US Justice Department.

Like many middle-class, suburban American parents, Shannan and Joey Troiano worried about their son's behaviour and his bad grades at high school. And like many wayward teenagers, Cory Ryder was grounded for weeks at a time, had a PlayStation confiscated and was banned from watching TV.

Less typically, this 16-year-old was plotting to murder his parents by hiring a hitman, while his mother was organising a sting operation involving a police officer posing as a contract killer.

Cory's trial is scheduled to begin today at the circuit court in St Mary's County, Maryland. His mother is expected to testify as a witness for the prosecution.

A Washington County Circuit judge called the leader of a metaphysical Internet sales company manipulative and controlling and his testimony unbelievable, even as he acquitted him Wednesday of charges that he had sex with an underage boy.

This handout image from the Virginia State Police shows the wreckage of Tom Callaghy's Dodge Minivan after a crash on U.S. Highway 13 on Virginia's Eastern Shore, April 1, 2001. Callaghy's wife, Janie, was killed in the crash, one of more than 1,550 people killed each year by drowsy driving.

Darla Drentlaw was sleeping on her daughter Katie's bed, waiting for her to come home, when she woke to the sound of police radios. When the officers knocked on her door, she knew they had bad news.

The US government is considering closing a war-on-terror detention center at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and granting it detainees substantially greater rights, The New York Times reported on its website Saturday.

Citing unnamed officials involved in the discussions, the newspaper said the plan also called for possibly moving most of the detainees to the United States.

Guy Fawkes most certainly was guilty of the crime of which he was charged and for which he was executed. But a great many other people suffered in the decades that followed merely because of their religious confession. For the most part they were Catholics. Or they had passed some time in Spain, France, or Italy for which they could not account to the government's satisfaction.

Remember, remember the fifth of November,
The gunpowder, treason and plot,
I know of no reason
Why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot
Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, 'twas his intent
To blow up the King and Parliament.
Three score barrels of powder below,
Poor old England to overthrow;
By God's providence he was catch'd
With a dark lantern and burning match.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, make the bells ring.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, God save the King!
Hip hip hoorah!

A penny loaf to feed the Pope.
A farthing o' cheese to choke him.
A pint of beer to rinse it down.
A faggot of sticks to burn him.
Burn him in a tub of tar.
Burn him like a blazing star.
Burn his body from his head.
Then we'll say ol' Pope is dead.
Hip hip hoorah!
Hip hip hoorah hoorah!

The bodies of nine hunters have been found in a wooded area in the southern Russian republic of Kabardino-Balkaria, where police suspect they were killed after running across a militant group, a police source said on Monday.

"The victims, identified as four hunters and five gamekeepers accompanying them, should have encountered a camp of militants, who killed them and took away their rifles," a police source said.

MOSCOW - Russian detectives investigating a bus bomb blast which killed eight people said on Thursday they had identified a suspect, amid fears of fresh terror attacks in the run-up to parliamentary elections next month.

Tbilisi - Georgia's opposition vowed Sunday to press on with mass protests after President Mikheil Saakashvili rejected demands for early elections following three days of demonstrations against his government.

"If he thinks that we will stop and that's it, he's wrong," said Tina Khidasheli of the opposition Republican Party. "Unfortunately the president has decided to ignore the will of his people."

In his first public statement since protests broke out on Friday, Saakashvili rejected opposition demands for elections to be held in April instead of late next year as planned.

They say twins share a strong bond - but the one between Gabriel and Ieuan Jones was unbreakable.

When doctors found that Gabriel was weaker than his brother, with an enlarged heart,and believed he was going to die in the womb, his mother Rebecca Jones had to make a heartbreaking decision.

Doctors told her his death could cause his twin brother to die too before they were born, and that it would be better to end Gabriel's suffering sooner rather than later.

Mrs Jones decided to let doctors operate to terminate Gabriel's life.

Firstly they tried to sever his umbilical cord to cut off his blood supply, but the cord was too strong. They then cut Mrs Jones's placenta in half so that when Gabriel died, it would not affect his twin brother.

But after the operation which was meant to end his life, tiny Gabriel had other ideas. Although he weighed less than a pound, he put up such a fight for survival that doctors called him Rocky.

Astonishingly, he managed to carry on living in his mother's womb for another five weeks - until the babies were delivered by caesarean section.

Three people have been killed after fire swept a retirement home in the Tula Region in central Russia, the regional emergencies center said on Sunday.

Firefighters received a signal about the fire at the home for the elderly in the village of Velye-Nikolskoye, 30 kilometers (19 miles) to the south-west of Tula, at about 1:20 p.m. Moscow time (10:20 a.m. GMT) November 4, the emergencies center said.

The US has hailed Turkey as moderate Islamic democracy, the kind it would like to see develop elsewhere. It's a key NATO ally, with US aircraft stationed here.

Yet, as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrives in Ankara Friday to defuse tensions over Kurdish rebels operating in Iraq, she faces a nation that is now the most anti-American in the world, according to one survey. In the meetings with Ms. Rice, and next Monday in Washington with President Bush, Turkey's prime minister is expected to press the US to take steps against the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) rebels in Iraq.

A trip into outer space may seem a good way to escape everyday life on Earth, but British space tourists will find that while they might defy gravity, there is to be no getting away from the law.

Ministers have ordered a review of an obscure piece of legislation controlling the UK's activities in space. They believe that when Virgin Galactic and other companies begin offering public flights into space, rules will be needed to control the industry and the behaviour of British subjects in orbit.

An Italian gunman shot and killed a man and injured at least six other people on Saturday when he opened fire from his balcony at passers-by and police in a town outside Rome, police said, without offering a motive.

Angelo Spagnolo, 52, who media identified as a retired army captain, surrendered after a more than two-hour standoff in the town of Guidonia, east of Italy's capital. Police said it was unclear whether Spagnolo was still in the military.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Police fired tear gas and clubbed thousands of lawyers protesting President Gen. Pervez Musharraf's decision to impose emergency rule, as Western allies threatened to review aid to the troubled Muslim nation. Opposition groups put the number of arrests at 3,500, although the government reported half that.

A journalist arrested with French aid workers as they tried to fly 103 African children out of Chad criticised the activists for their "amateurishness" but said they were convinced their mission was legitimate.

Manila, Philippines - Perhaps you've seen a movie titled V for Vendetta, truly a film for our times. In it, a masked man known only as "V" interrupts the state-controlled media and makes an unauthorized televised address to a London in the grip of a totalitarian prime minister.

Riot troops swept through Pakistan Sunday, throwing hundreds of government opponents into jail as people took to the streets to protest the martial law clampdown and the suspension of the constitution.

Government forces shut down television stations, arrested hundreds of lawyers and human rights activists, and attacked opposition rallies with tear gas and clubs as the crisis deepened in the teetering nation - one of the world's nuclear powers and a precarious ally of the U.S. in the war on terror.

Pakistan's sacked Chief Justice Iftikhar M Chaudhry has described President Pervez Musharraf's post-emergency set-up as "illegal and unconstitutional" in his first comments after being deposed by the General.

"Everything that is happening today is illegal, unconstitutional and against the orders of the Supreme Court, Chaudhury, who was put under house arrest after he refused to take oath under Musharraf's Provisional Constitutional Order, told The News daily on telephone here on Sunday night.

President Pervez Musharraf was today forced to deny rumours that he had been placed under house arrest as protests broke out in every major Pakistani city against the country's state of emergency.

As police used tear gas to put down demonstrations in Lahore, Karachi, Rawalpindi and Multan by lawyers and political moderates furious at the President's decision to suspend democracy, senior spokesmen issued hasty denials to rumours sweeping the country that the military ruler had been sidelined by his army second in command.

The United States said Sunday it was reviewing its generous aid to Pakistan but appeared caught in a dilemma over the emergency rule imposed by the military ruler of its "war on terror" ally.

Influential senators from both the Democratic and Republican parties said Washington was paying the price for putting its alliance with President Pervez Musharraf above the democratic needs of the nuclear-armed nation.

Social Democrat Alvaro Colom apeared to be headed for victory in Guatemala's run-off presidential elections as partial returns gave him a four-and-a-half-point lead over his rival, former general Otto Perez Molina.

With nearly 82 percent of precincts reporting, Colom had 52.29 percent of the vote against Perez Molina with 47.71 percent, the Supreme Electoral Council (TSE) said.

Voting ended at 6:00 pm (0000 GMT Monday) and pre-election surveys had predicted a close race.

A North Korean delegation led by Prime Minister Kim Yong-il arrived in Hanoi last Friday to learn about the booming Southest Asian nation's reform policy. Kim met with his Vietnamese counterpart Nguyen Tan Dung on Saturday and signed agreements including a memorandum on cooperation in agricultural science and technology.

Police began rounding up some 1,500 opposition figures, lawyers and activists on Sunday to be placed under house arrest as Pakistan descended into martial law after President Pervez Musharraf declared a state of emergency in the country.

In a clamp down on media outlets, Musharraf also instituted new laws prohibiting any reports containing, "any opinion that is prejudicial to the ideology of Pakistan or integrity of Pakistan".

Musharraf, acting on what he calls a paralysis of government by judicial interference, announced the state of emergency on Saturday saying, "I will not allow this country to commit suicide."

In January 2002, when President Bush named Iraq, Iran and North Korea as the first targets in his 'global war against terror' - the putative 'axis of evil' - few noticed a curious omission. Pakistan was not on the list.

The targeted countries - we were told - sought weapons of mass destruction. In truth, Iraq and Iran were targeted because they stood in the way of Israeli ambitions - and they had oil.

Although Pakistan has been unlucky in oil, it could make stronger claims as a target for American and Israeli ire. It is the only Muslim country with nuclear weapons, a nuclear proliferator, the Taliban's chief patron, and a sponsor of jihadis in Kashmir.

Empty shelves in Caracas. Food riots in West Bengal and Mexico. Warnings of hunger in Jamaica, Nepal, the Philippines and sub-Saharan Africa. Soaring prices for basic foods are beginning to lead to political instability, with governments being forced to step in to artificially control the cost of bread, maize, rice and dairy products.

Record world prices for most staple foods have led to 18% food price inflation in China, 13% in Indonesia and Pakistan, and 10% or more in Latin America, Russia and India, according to the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO). Wheat has doubled in price, maize is nearly 50% higher than a year ago and rice is 20% more expensive, says the UN. Next week the FAO is expected to say that global food reserves are at their lowest in 25 years and that prices will remain high for years.

Chandler Regional Medical Center's flu shot drill Saturday was a hit with residents and considered a success by officials testing the hospital's ability to respond to a bioterror or other mass medical emergency.

Cars began lining up for the free drive-though vaccinations as early as 6 a.m. even though the start time wasn't scheduled until 7:30 a.m., said hospital spokeswoman Kimberly Day.

Chandler health officials are asking residents to roll down their car windows and roll up their sleeves for an emergency terrorism drill that will test the efficiency of mass drive-through vaccinations.

At university, we male students used to say that it was impossible to take a beautiful young woman to the cinema and concentrate on the film. But in Canada, I've at last proved this to be untrue. Familiar with the Middle East and its abuses - and with the vicious policies of George Bush - we both sat absorbed by Rendition, Gavin Hood's powerful, appalling testimony of the torture of a "terrorist suspect" in an unidentified Arab capital after he was shipped there by CIA thugs in Washington.

Apocalyptic project in Jerusalem: A giant bunker will protect politicians and the military from a nuclear attack.

They call it "the modern Noah's Ark" or "the Final Day's refuge". On Jerusalem's mounts one of the biggest and most secret projects ever accomplished in the history of Israel is being built. A giant underground bunker inside which the leaders of Israel will protect themselves in case of a nuclear attack: ministers, deputies and generals who, from inside, will direct the destiny of the nation, as well as the military reaction after the attack.

For the past year, construction on a secret tunneling project has been taking place in the Judean Hills, Channel Ten television reported last night. At a huge cost, the government is preparing an underground command center, capable of withstanding atomic, biological and chemical attacks. MK Yossi Sarid said in response that the expense was "wasteful" and the country had managed just fine for 55 years without an underground bunker.

The two sales are being referred to by market traders as "bin Laden trades" because only an event on the scale of 9-11 could make these short-sell options valuable.

There are 65,000 contracts @ $750.00 for the SPX 700 calls for open interest. That controls 6.5 million shares at $750 = $4.5 Billion. Not a single trade. But quite a bit of dollars on a contract that is 700 points away from current value. No one would buy that deep "in the money" calls. No reason to. So if they were sold, it looks like someone betting on massive dislocation. Lots of very strange option activity that I haven't seen before.

The entity or individual offering these sales can only make money if the market drops 30%-50% within the next four weeks. If the market does not drop, the entity or individual involved stands to lose over $1 billion just for engaging in these contracts.

Clearly, someone knows something big is going to happen BEFORE the options expire on Sept. 21.

Subpoenas issued to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley and other top Bush administration officials could end up shedding unprecedented light on the government's dealings with the pro-Israel lobby and the Bush administration's inner workings.

When it comes to Iran's nuclear capabilities, whose word would you rather take: that of a Nobel prize-winning head of an international agency specializing in nuclear issues who was proved triumphantly right about Iraq, or that of a bunch of belligerent neocons who make no secret of their desire to whack Iran at the earliest opportunity and who made such a pigs ear of Iraq?

That is the stark choice facing the sane people of the world, given the smearing of IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei for not joining the hysterical lynch mob building up against Iran. Criticised by Condoleezza Rice and others in the Bush administration, it is uncannily reminiscent of the slurs against him and UN weapons inspector Hans Blix in the run up to the invasion of Iraq - and we should remember that the US vindictively tried to unseat him afterwards for not joining in the lying game.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said he may be able to make peace with the Palestinians by the end of 2008 as the United States vowed to defend Israel's security during the difficult process.

"If we act decisively together, we and the Palestinians, there is a chance for us to reach real achievements, maybe even before the end of President (George W.) Bush's term," he said in a speech at the Saban Forum think-tank in Jerusalem.

Comment: US vows to defends Israel's security. The fact is that Israel's security is NOT threatened. What is seriously threatened is the survival of the Palestinian people, who are being collectively punished and kept in concentration camp conditions. The Zionists are not interested in peace. They want to eradicate the Palestinians and steal more land. The facts on the ground show that to be the case.

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State." (Joseph Goebbels)

Last Sunday I came across an article in The New York Times with the title "Analysts Find Israel Struck a Nuclear Project Inside Syria", quoting American and foreign officials with access to the intelligence reports. After reading a paragraph, it was blatantly obvious that the foreign officials could only be Israeli officials, as they are the only ones with unfettered access to intelligence reports and whose nationality are routinely not mentioned.

Utopian fantasies have long transfixed the human race. Yet today a much rarer fantasy has become popular in the United States. Millions of Americans, the richest people in history, have a death wish. They are the new "Armageddonites," fundamentalist evangelicals who have moved from forecasting Armageddon to actually trying to bring it about.

There is an article in Thursday's New York Times about the way Michael Mukasey has been hedging on waterboarding. The difficulty, according to many experts is, as "Jack L. Goldsmith, who served in the Justice Department in 2003 and 2004, wrote in his recent memoir, The Terror Presidency, that the possibility of future prosecution for aggressive actions against terrorism was a constant worry inside the Bush administration." Another expert points out that future prosecutors "... would ask not just who carried it out, but who specifically approved it. Theoretically, it could go all the way up to the president of the United States; that's why he'll never say it's torture."

When military investigators questioned Erie County Judge Michael E. Dunlavey about reported prisoner abuse during his tenure at the Guantanamo Bay camp for suspected terrorists, Dunlavey told them he got his "marching orders" from President Bush, according to a new book about U.S. policies regarding torture.

This is the cover of the book "Administration of Torture" by Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh.

The book, "Administration of Torture: A Documentary Record from Washington to Abu Ghraib and Beyond," relies on government documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act to trace the development of what the authors claim was prisoner abuse and torture that emerged in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

A federal judge yesterday issued a rare ruling that ordered Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and more than 10 other prominent current and former government officials to testify on behalf of two pro-Israel lobbyists accused of violating the Espionage Act at their upcoming criminal trial.

The opinion by U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III in Alexandria directed that subpoenas be issued to officials who include Rice, national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley, former high-level Department of Defense officials Paul D. Wolfowitz and Douglas J. Feith, and Richard L. Armitage, the former deputy secretary of state.

John M. Broder and James RisenInternational Herald Tribune2007-11-03 00:13:00

Blackwater Worldwide, its reputation in tatters and its lucrative government contracts in jeopardy, is mounting an aggressive legal, political and public relations counterstrike.

It has hired a bipartisan stable of big-name Washington lawyers, lobbyists and press advisers, including the public relations powerhouse Burson-Marsteller, which was brought in briefly, but at a critical moment, to help Blackwater's chairman, Erik Prince, prepare for his first congressional hearing.

A new bill submitted by Knesset Member David Rotem (Yisrael Beiteinu) on Monday calls for stipulating eligibility for a citizenship on a declaration of loyalty to the State of Israel.

According to the bill, those who apply for Israeli citizenship will have to pledge allegiance in the following form: "I hereby pledge my loyalty to the State of Israel as a Jewish, Zionist and democratic state, its symbols and values, and serve the country, as shall be required of me, in the IDF."

A relative stands over a body of a killed child in a hospital morgue in Baqouba, the capital of Diyala province, 60 kilometers (35 miles) northeast of Baghdad, Iraq, Sunday, Nov. 4, 2007. At least 12 people were killed or found dead Sunday in the troubled Diyala province northeast of Baghdad.

Despite President Bush's claims that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons that could trigger "World War III," experts in and out of government say there's no conclusive evidence that Tehran has an active nuclear-weapons program.

Even his own administration appears divided about the immediacy of the threat. While Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney speak of an Iranian weapons program as a fact, Bush's point man on Iran, Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns, has attempted to ratchet down the rhetoric.

The Iraqi defector whose claims regarding Saddam Hussein's biological warfare capabilities were central to the US government's case for the 2003 invasion, despite repeated warnings that they were dubious, has been unmasked by a television documentary.

Ramallah, West Bank - The Palestinian prime minister urged Israel on Saturday to release 2,000 Palestinian prisoners ahead of a U.S.-hosted Mideast conference, saying it was time for bold steps to raise hopes for peace.

Hundreds of Palestinian farmers in the Palestinian Plaines areas, in West Bank's Jordan Valley region, are still deprived from reaching their farmlands, and olive orchards, since their lands are near or behind the Annexation Wall, an issue which threatens to cause the loss of the entire olive harvest season.

LONDON: A Royal Navy aircraft carrier is to be sent to the Gulf in early 2008, the defence ministry in London said on Friday but added that its deployment was not linked to possible military action against Iran.

A ministry spokesman told AFP that HMS (Her Majesty's Ship) Illustrious will head for the Gulf accompanied by the Type 42 destroyer HMS Edinburgh and the Type 23 frigate HMS Westminster.

Thirty US senators wrote to President George W. Bush, warning he had no authority to launch military action against Iran, and expressing concern about the administration's "provocative" rhetoric. The senators, 29 Democrats and one independent, urged the resolution of disputes with the Islamic republic through diplomacy.

Every year Forbes omits the ultra-wealthy "blue bloods" who own our Federal Reserve and much, much more. We all know who they are, most of their names have become household words over the last 4 generations. Why are their names not included in the top 400 richest list year after year?

Forbes also publishes an annual list of all billionaires. This year there were 990 total. There is a conspicuous absence of the old money names in this list as well. Sometimes the most important stories are those never printed!

Fear and mistrust gripped Wall Street on Monday after Citigroup's CEO quit in the wake of mounting credit losses and an influential money manager called the subprime mortgage market a "$1 trillion problem."

Citigroup Inc. Chairman and Chief Executive Charles Prince, beset by the company's billions of dollars in losses from investing in bad debt, resigned Sunday and is being replaced as chairman by former Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin.

Meredith Whitney, the analyst who prompted a $369 billion (£177 billion) plunge in the value of US shares on Thursday by issuing a negative note on Citigroup, hit out at Wall Street's culture of intimidation yesterday after receiving several death threats from investors in the bank.

Edward Mattar, owner of the failed BestBank, was to be sentenced Friday afternoon on fraud-related charges. He was convicted with two other men in February. Hours before his sentencing, Mattar killed himself.

Masaya Igarashi wants $200 headphones for his new iPod Touch, and he's torn between Nintendo Co.'s Wii and Sony's PlayStation 3 game consoles. When he has saved up again, he plans to splurge on a digital camera or flat-screen TV.

There's one conspicuous omission from the college student's shopping list: a new computer.

The PC's role in Japanese homes is diminishing, as its once-awesome monopoly on processing power is encroached by gadgets such as smart phones that act like pocket-size computers, advanced Internet-connected game consoles, and digital video recorders with terabytes of memory.

When the market for mortgage securities entered a meltdown over the summer, financial firms holding billions of dollars of hard-to-trade assets used mathematical pricing models that were heavily dependent on credit ratings. When the credit-rating firms began a massive downgrade campaign last month, firms such as Citigroup Inc. and Merrill Lynch & Co. saw the value of their holdings plummet.

Citigroup's struggles to put an exact number on its losses demonstrate just how fallible the models can be, and how serious the consequences. Last night, Citigroup said that the downgrades will result in a reduction of fourth-quarter net income of $5 billion to $7 billion. That follows a third quarter when Citigroup recorded mortgage-related write-downs of $2.2 billion in the third quarter, including losses on subprime securities and fixed-income trading.

The dollar fell to a record against the euro and dropped to the weakest since 1981 versus the pound on concern deepening credit-market losses will prompt the Federal Reserve to reduce interest rates a third time this year.

The global economy is now at the mercy of enchanted words. Don't say recession. You just might start one.

Recession.

That's me throwing off all the "R-Word Indexes" which claim to predict whether or not we are entering a recession based on how many times the word appears in the media.

Of course it's not just journalists who have the power to destroy the lives of millions with their careless word selections. After Vice-President-Select Dick Cheney used the R-word last week, the Clinton administration's chief economic advisor accused the Bush team of "talking down our economy." Don't they know about the s-words? Slowing, softening, slipping and -- if absolutely necessary -- slumping.

For many the Federal Reserve still walks on water. Investors have built up an unhealthy level of confidence in the central bank's ability to keep the US economy humming through thick and thin. They could do with a dose of cynicism.

On Oct. 24, Merrill Lynch announced its biggest write-down ever, an $8.4 billion charge that also represents the biggest known loss in Wall Street history. Six days later, its chief executive, E. Stanley O'Neal, retired from the company he had run since 2002.

Mr. O'Neal's departure, many analysts say, was a victory for accountability: ultimately, the corporate buck stops with the chief executive, and he bore the cost of Merrill's ill-fated embrace of complex, risky debt instruments whose value collapsed in tandem with the plunging subprime mortgage market.

But amid the shoot-the-C.E.O. fervor that has arisen in the wake of Merrill's disclosure - and after a similar and earlier announcement from another troubled bank, Citigroup - analysts are quick to point out that no major corporation is a one-man operation. They ask who else had helped Mr. O'Neal mind the store at Merrill, and wonder to what extent accountability for effective oversight of financial strategies and gambits reached beyond the chief executive's suite and into the boardroom.

Recent news from media sources would have readers believe that Brazil is euphoric in its corn production. It is true that we are seeing some impressive figures, and never have we exported so much corn. Predictions show that corn production will only increase in 2008.

And according to analyses being done by agribusiness, the expectation is that Brazil will become the biggest exporter of corn in the world.

The western media call it "Chavez Bank" -- but what are they really afraid of?

"Developing nations must create their own mechanisms of finance instead of suffering under those of the IMF and the World Bank, which are institutions of rich nations . . . it is time to wake up."

That was Lula da Silva, the president of Brazil -- not Washington's nemesis, Hugo Chavez -- speaking in the Republic of Congo just two weeks ago. Although our foreign policy establishment remains in cozy denial about it, the recognition that Washington's economic policies and institutions have failed miserably in Latin America is broadly shared among leaders in the region. Commentators here -- Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the editorial boards and op-ed contributors in major newspapers -- have taken pains to distinguish "good" leftist presidents (Lula of Brazil and Michele Bachelet of Chile) from the "bad" ones -- Chavez of Venezuela, Rafael Correa of Ecuador, Evo Morales of Bolivia and, depending on the pundit, sometimes Nestor Kirchner of Argentina.

Fears of a fresh wave of losses arising from the credit squeeze spread around the globe on Friday, depressing stock markets in Europe and Asia and savaging bank shares for the second day in a row.

Despite a surge in US employment growth last month, investors remained worried that banks and other financial institutions still faced heavy losses arising from the troubled US mortgage market and related securities.

A day after a false alarm on Indonesia's Mount Kelut led to panic among residents on its slopes, the volcano is showing signs of an imminent eruption, a scientist said Sunday.

"An eruption is now very, very much possible, although so far it has not yet happened," said Agus Budianto, a geologist monitoring the activities of the volcano in the densely populated East Java province.

On Saturday, continuous tremors beneath the volcano became so strong that they could no longer be read on seismological instruments, leading scientists to evacuate their posts and warn an eruption appeared to have occurred.

They could not confirm it visually as the top of the historically deadly mountain was shrouded by clouds but their warning led residents still in the danger zone to flee in fear for their lives.

No one can deny that in recent years the need to "save the planet" from global warming has become one of the most pervasive issues of our time. As Tony Blair's chief scientific adviser, Sir David King, claimed in 2004, it poses "a far greater threat to the world than international terrorism", warning that by the end of this century the only habitable continent left will be Antarctica.

Inevitably, many people have been bemused by this somewhat one-sided debate, imagining that if so many experts are agreed, then there must be something in it. But if we set the story of how this fear was promoted in the context of other scares before it, the parallels which emerge might leave any honest believer in global warming feeling uncomfortable.

VILLAHERMOSA, Mexico - Rescue workers and police were out in force helping flood victims in southern Mexico, as food shortages sent hundreds of hungry people on a looting rampage at a shopping center.

Around 80 percent of the Belgium-sized state of Tabasco was flooded after seven rain-loaded rivers burst their banks in the flat, flood-prone region, in its worst natural disaster in decades.

Comment: Using the word looting is a way of stigmatizing the victims of the disaster. The word looting refers to the act of stealing private property in acts of war or riots and thus a criminal act. In case of disaster where people, who are starving and who feed themselves through taking of food from stores can not be compared to war or riot situations. Especially when the food due to lack of refrigeration would go off anyway. Think about it! What would you do if you were in their place and your family were starving, the place inundated with water and the authorities unable to deliver aid?

Scientists have been trying for years to come up with a way to predict quakes without much luck. But a man was able to predict Tuesday night's Bay Area earthquake using a system he's worked on for years.

On Sunday, Luke Thomas posted his quake prediction on his website called quakeprediction.com and on YouTube. Pointing to a brightly colored map of California, Thomas points to what he says are low-risk areas in the northeastern and southern parts of the state.

The water level in the Hoai River in the ancient town of Hoi An, Quang Nam Province, continues to rise due to heavy rains.

Seven people have died and 30 others have been injured by the recent extreme weather conditions in Viet Nam's central region, according to Vietnam News Agency.

Six people are still missing.

Authorities in Quang Nam Province have told relevant sectors to evacuate people in areas threatened by landslides and floods, and have distributed food, oil, petrol and medicine to localities that have been cut off by flooding.

Nearly 40 small aftershocks struck on the Calaveras Fault on Wednesday, following Tuesday night's moderate earthquake near San Jose that startled residents throughout the Bay Area.

The 5.6-magnitude quake caused only minor damage in South Bay communities, and the aftershocks - the largest at 3:54 p.m. with a magnitude of 3.7 - occurred south of the main quake's epicenter near the Calaveras Reservoir, according to Tom Brocher, a seismologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park.

Elena Neil's oldest daughter already showed symptoms of autism by the time Neil learned that Pennsylvania allowed parents to claim a religious exemption from mandatory vaccinations of their children.

Fever and rashes afflicted Gina, now 9, each time she received a vaccination, her mother said. But when Gina became reclusive and introverted after five vaccinations in one day when she was about 15 months old, Neil wondered if those treatments were causing her daughter's health problems.

Several years of naturopathic treatments have rid Gina of her neurological disorder symptoms, her mother said. Yet she is allergic to penicillin, peanuts, wheat and gluten and has asthma. Neil said she believes the vaccinations caused those maladies.

"People look at me like I'm crazy because I've never had Olivia vaccinated," Neil, 40, of Bethel Park said about her second daughter, who is 5. "But she's had nothing of what Gina has."

[Rachel's introduction: Evidence is piling up to show that many chemicals can cause serious illnesses, which then can be passed on to our children and grandchildren.]

New evidence is flooding in to suggest that many industrial chemicals are more dangerous than previously understood. During the 1990s, it came as a surprise that many industrial chemicals can interfere with the hormone systems of many species, including humans. Hormones are chemicals that circulate in the blood stream at very low levels (parts per billion, and in some cases parts per trillion), acting like switches, turning on and off bodily processes. From the moment of conception throughout the remainder of life, our growth, development and even many kinds of behavior are controlled by hormones.

It sounds like something out of a science fiction novel - people being programmed to develop obesity or diabetes 20 or 30 years before they are born, when they exist as a mere dot in their grandmother's womb.

An unholy alliance of California Child Protective Services (CPS) with a hostile doctor and judge is attempting to railroad Laurie Jessop, framed as a threat to her son and the establishment for finding a way to cure him of malignant melanoma. She is now on trial, under a gag order, since she had gone to the press. When she was arrested, she was put in maximum security, solitary confinement, in the Orange County, CA jail. They claim that everything about. her says anti-Establishment, so she was told, as she was considered a threat in starting a riot.

About 6 percent of Afghanistan and Iraq war veterans seeking treatment at Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals have been diagnosed with traumatic brain injuries, according to preliminary data released Friday.

A VA mandatory screening program that took effect in April has looked at 61,285 veterans of the wars. Of those, 19.2 percent were identified on the screening questionnaire as potentially suffering from traumatic brain injuries and were referred for more tests.

While evaluation continues, VA spokeswoman Alison Aikele said officials believe, based on a smaller sample, that the final result about 5.8 percent will be diagnosed with TBI.

New research comparing music conductors and non-musicians shows that both the conductors and the non-musicians "tuned out" their visual sense while performing a difficult hearing task. As the task became harder, however, only the non-musicians tuned out more of their visual sense, indicating that the training and experience of the conductors changed how their brains work.

The research, a joint project of Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG) Music Research Institute, was presented today at the 37th annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in San Diego, Calif.

The study involved 20 conductors and 20 musically untrained subjects. The subjects were between the ages of 28-40, and the conductors had an average of more than 10 years of experience as a band or orchestra director in middle or high school.

A "personal trainer" can enhance an adolescent's motivation and capability of managing diabetes, according to a randomized trial sponsored by the National Institutes of Health.

Dr. Tonja R. Nansel, at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in Bethesda, Maryland, and colleagues developed a program to provide young type 1, or "insulin-dependent," diabetics with one-on-one interaction with a facilitator to improve self-monitoring, goal-setting, and problem-solving.

Agricultural giant Cargill Inc said on Saturday it was recalling more than 1 million pounds of ground beef distributed in the United States because of possible E. coli contamination.

Cargill Meat Solutions said the 1.084 million pounds (491,700 kg) of ground beef was produced at the Wyalusing, Pennsylvania, facility between October 8 and October 11, and distributed to retailers across the country.

The following letter was received by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research, Milwaukee Wisconsin, on 2 October 1954, from Mr. Charles Perkins, a chemist:

"I have your letter of September 29 asking for further documentation regarding a statement made in my book, The Truth About Water Fluoridation, to the effect that the idea of water fluoridation was brought to England from Russia by the Russian Communist Kreminoff. "In the 1930's, Hitler and the German Nazi's envisioned a world to be dominated and controlled by a Nazi philosophy of pan-Germanism. The German chemists worked out a very ingenious and far-reaching plan of mass-control which was submitted to and adopted by the German General Staff. This plan was to control the population in any given area through mass medication of drinking water supplies. By this method they could control the population in whole areas, reduce population by water medication that would produce sterility in women, and so on. In this scheme of mass-control, sodium fluoride occupied a prominent place.

Odds are you've run across one of these characters in your career. They're glib, charming, manipulative, deceitful, ruthless -- and very, very destructive. And there may be lots of them in America's corner offices.

One of the most provocative ideas about business in this decade so far surfaced in a most unlikely place. The forum wasn't the Harvard Business School or one of those $4,000-a-head conferences where Silicon Valley's venture capitalists search for the next big thing. It was a convention of Canadian cops in the far-flung province of Newfoundland. The speaker, a 71-year-old professor emeritus from the University of British Columbia, remains virtually unknown in the business realm. But he's renowned in his own field: criminal psychology. Robert Hare is the creator of the Psychopathy Checklist. The 20-item personality evaluation has exerted enormous influence in its quarter-century history. It's the standard tool for making clinical diagnoses of psychopaths -- the 1% of the general population that isn't burdened by conscience. Psychopaths have a profound lack of empathy. They use other people callously and remorselessly for their own ends. They seduce victims with a hypnotic charm that masks their true nature as pathological liars, master con artists, and heartless manipulators. Easily bored, they crave constant stimulation, so they seek thrills from real-life "games" they can win -- and take pleasure from their power over other people.

The term Emotional Intelligence could be defined as the capacity to perceive, comprehend and regulate one's own emotions and those of others so as to be able to distinguish between emotions and use this information as a guide for one's thoughts and actions. One of the important benefits of developing this type of intelligence is the ability to learn how to interact with others and to face an ever changing social and cultural world more effectively.

Comment: In other words, so called "emotional intelligence" is a defense/dumping mechanism or buffer against ever increasing stress of everyday reality.

The Stress and Health Research Group (GIES) of the UAB Department of General, Development and Educational Psychology has carried out a research entitled "Perceived emotional intelligence and its relation to tobacco and cannabis use among university students".The objective of this research consisted in analysing the possible relation between EI and the use of tobacco and cannabis among 133 UAB psychology students with an average age of 21.5.

One afternoon in early September, an architect boarded his commuter train and became a cellphone vigilante. He sat down next to a 20-something woman who he said was "blabbing away" into her phone.

"She was using the word 'like' all the time. She sounded like a Valley Girl," said the architect, Andrew, who declined to give his last name because what he did next was illegal.

Andrew reached into his shirt pocket and pushed a button on a black device the size of a cigarette pack. It sent out a powerful radio signal that cut off the chatterer's cellphone transmission - and any others in a 30-foot radius.

An artificial intelligence researcher predicts that robotics will make such dramatic advances in the coming years that humans will be marrying robots by the year 2050.

Robots will become so human-like -- having intelligent conversations, displaying emotions and responding to human emotions -- that they'll be very much like a new race of people, said David Levy, a British artificial intelligence researcher whose book, "Love and Sex with Robots," will be released on Nov. 6.

Gone, he says, will be the jerky movements and artificial-sounding voices generally associated with robots. These will be highly human-like machines that people fall in love with, becoming aides, friends and even spouses.

Cars sprouting whirling lasers on top, moving cameras on the sides, and banks of computers inside sped through the streets of a California desert ghost town on Saturday in a robot race -- no drivers needed.

A member of the Massachuset Institute of Technology (MIT) team tunes their autonomous vehicle's computer before the start of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Urban Challenge race in Victorville, California November 3, 2007.

Physicists in Arizona State University have designed a revolutionary laser technique which can destroy viruses and bacteria such as AIDS without damaging human cells and may also help reduce the spread of hospital infections such as MRSA. The research, published on Thursday November 1 in the Institute of Physics' Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter, discusses how pulses from an infrared laser can be fine-tuned to discriminate between problem microorganisms and human cells.

Femtosecond lasers could find immediate application in hospitals as a way to disinfect blood supply or biomaterials and for the treatment of blood-borne diseases such as AIDS and Hepatitis.

Current laser treatments such as UV are indiscriminate and can cause aging of the skin, damage to the DNA or, at worst, skin cancer, and are far from 100 per cent effective.

Femtosecond laser pulses, through a process called Impulsive Stimulated Raman Scattering (ISRS), produces lethal vibrations in the protein coat of microorganisms, thereby destroying them. The effect of the vibrations is similar to that of high-pitched noise shattering glass.

The Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies was given an ancient script yesterday which was discovered during a clean-up in a house in Hafnarfjördur a few years ago. The script is at least 200 to 300 years old and has mysterious writing.

"There are dots between the letters and they are neither runes nor Latin," manager of the institute Vésteinn Ólafsson told Fréttabladid. "It is some kind of a secret code written on skin in an old Icelandic binding."

Vanished after making loud reports; hundreds witnessed event which surprised even Ufologists.

The startling and crisp images of what would appear to be a UFO sighting recorded in broad daylight caused consternation among hundreds of witnesses only days ago. The subject drew the attention of local and national experts in ufology. Some photographs and vidcaps of the strange event have been collected, all taken by amateurs. Although the clarity of these images has caused doubt among the researchers, who suspect a photo-montage, they have been startled and even more interested in the subject upon learning of the existence of a video, since this would attest to the truthfulness of the event.

In January 1979, The New York Times reported that despite repeated, feverish denials, the CIA had indeed investigated the UFO phenomenon: "CIA Papers Detail UFO Surveillance" screamed the headline. The report is said to have so upset the then CIA director, Stansfield Turner, that he reportedly asked his staff: "Are we in UFOs?"

A woman from Winona in Minnesota is accusing a work colleague, who was pet sitting her pig, of neglect after she allowed the pig to become obese, a local daily newspaper said Wednesday.

Michelle Schmitz, 22, said she left the pot-bellied pig, Alaina Templeton, with a colleague in February while she was recovering from ankle surgery. Within nine months the pig's weight tripled - from 22 kg (50 pounds) to 68 kg (150 pounds). In addition, it had trouble breathing and "stunk real bad."

"That pig is my life," the Winona Daily News quotes the woman, who even has the pet's name tattooed on her body, as saying.

The upcoming Beijing Olympics is more than just a point of pride for China - it's such an important part of the national consciousness that nearly 3,500 children have been named for the event, a newspaper reported Sunday.

Most of the 3,491 people with the name "Aoyun," meaning Olympics, were born around the year 2000, as Beijing was bidding to host the 2008 Summer Games, the Beijing Daily reported, citing information from China's national identity card database.

The vast majority of people named Aoyun are male, the newspaper said. Only six live in Beijing. The report didn't say where the others live.